07 June 2011

Bristol STC Meetup

Wednesday 1st June was the test meetup in Bristol. Some of my personal highlights were:

A talk on the differences between software testing and hardware verification. The bug point to come out of this is the economies of bugs. In hardware, a bug cost a lot of money to fix, since you have to recall all your hardware that you have just spent millions developing and manufacturing. However, bugs in software are becoming increasingly cheaper to fix, thanks to the cloud and SaaS models mean you can update in a single place and everyone will benefit, as opposed to having to create thousands of CD's to be sent to customers to run.

A discussion on how to measure Quality, something that is, by its very nature, un-measurable since quality is defined by the observer and not a discrete measure.

Other talks included an overview of critical thinking. As the speaker himself stated, this was heavily influenced by Problem Solving 101 by Ken Watanabe. There was a talk on how test Automation isn't just checking, but that the results and measures and logs should feed into and help with the running of your sapient tests.

I have to say, I very much enjoyed myself. I met some passionate and articulate testers, came away with a lot to think about and will certainly be on the lookout for other testing events.

Lastly a thank you to all those who spoke, but a special thank you to Anna Baik for organising the event. I'll be sure to post about the next event I'm attending and I hope to see you there.